


An Unobstructed View

by AstroGirl



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Minor Sans/Toriel, Post-Undertale Pacifist Route, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 23:04:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15129677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: Out here, there's nothing between him and the stars.





	An Unobstructed View

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "The Sky at Night."

Sans isn't sleeping.

Everyone else is: his brother, Toriel, the kid, all tucked up safe and snug in their beds. He checked. He still does that, although at this point, it's more of a habit than anything. Call it a tradition, maybe. After six months on the surface, he's mostly shaken off the fear that they, or these versions of them, might disappear in their sleep. Or in his.

Which, oddly, has led to him sleeping less. It's remarkably easy, when there's so much worth staying awake for, even in the depths of the night. Besides, he sort of feels like he owes it to his telescope to use it for the thing it was actually meant for, after spending all those years underground as nothing but a prop for practical jokes.

Right now, he's using it to look at Saturn. He's done that a lot since the barrier fell, and he never gets tired of it. And not just because it's such great fodder for jokes, either. His favorite: Saturn has an average density of 0.687 grams per cubic centimeter – less than that of water. So if you had a big enough bathtub to put it in, it would float. But, of course, it would leave a ring. _Heh._

But Saturn's not just funny. It's beautiful, too. (And aren't the very best things _both_ of those? For a moment, his mind wanders to the boss monster sleeping peacefully in the house behind him, and, beneath the eyepiece, his wide, bony grin softens a little.) 

Even more than that, though, Saturn is a _place_. A real place, unimaginably distant, and he can _see_ it. There's no rock in the way, no barriers. Nothing between him and a world a billion kilometers away. 

Nothing between him and the rest of the universe, either. He raises his eye socket from the telescope and looks up at the stars. _Real_ stars, not crystals on a cavern ceiling pretending to be stars. They're so far away that even in a telescope they're still only dimensionless points of light. Even the ones big enough to swallow most of the solar system.

It's an overwhelming thing to think about, the kind of thing that can make people much larger than Sans feel uncomfortably small. But, somehow, he finds it reassuring. There's so much universe out there in front of him. So much space. So much _time_. The light from some of those stars has been traveling for hundreds of years. Hundreds of years of linear time, and it made it here. It made it to this house.

Above the trees that screen them from the lights of the highway, the moon is rising: a gleaming crescent of reflected sunlight. A reminder that the sun is still there, behind the Earth. That it will be back to shine on them all again in the morning.

In its own way, the moon's even more impressive in a telescope than Saturn. You can see mountains, craters, plains. _Terrain._ You can imagine walking on it. 

But Sans doesn't need the telescope for that anymore. Instead, he raises his hand up towards the moon for a moment. He almost thinks that if he reaches far enough, he can touch it. Can open a shortcut to the moon, to the sky, to all the worlds beyond. To a beautiful, limitless eternity. On, and on, and on.

He can go anywhere. He has space. He has _time_. He has everything.

Gently, he replaces the lens cap on the telescope and returns it to its place in the shed. He crosses the cool, moonlit grass of the yard, opens the door, and goes back in to his family.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The View from Here (The Constellations Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15938789) by [kay_obsessive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/pseuds/kay_obsessive)




End file.
